August 2008

August 31, 2008

This is pretty cool. Although it was published in May, I just found out that Jimmy Atkinson listed me in his 25 Most Influential People in the Web Hosting Industry over at the Web Hosting Database (WHDb) site. The list is made of three categories founders/CEOs, CTOs/Engineering and Marketing people. I'm in the latter category.

If you're wondering what I have to do with "web hosting", the connection of course is cloud computing, which is converging hosting with infrastructure software and other aspects of the industry (but more on that in an upcomg post about Platform-as-a-Service).

In any case, thanks for including me, Jimmy. It's a very distinguished list.

August 27, 2008

I knew it wouldn't be long before we start seeing the ability to deploy to the clouds directly from the IDE. The folks at Aptana seem to be leading the pack on this one. Check out this very cool demo of Aptana Cloud. It was sent to me by Kent Langley. It not only lets you deploy to the cloud directly from the IDE (Aptana Studio), it keeps your local project synched with the cloud deployed project. It also comes as an Eclipse Plug-In.

The folks at Aptana have set it up so that you can play around with this without actually giving you credit card info. I also understand that the underlying cloud they are currently using is Joyent.

August 19, 2008

Although the title "Geva Perry's Blog" is extremely sexy and just rolls off the tongue, it was always meant to be a temporary placeholder which seems to have stuck for 2 years. Anyway, from now on it has a new title which reflects my commitment and interest in cloud computing.

By the way, this is a good opportunity for thanking Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge for listing this blog in a group of excellent cloud computing-related blogs. And a good opportunity to return some link-love...:-)

While the debate on the actual definition of cloud computing rages on, it seems that a whole new cloud computing vocabulary is rapidly emerging. I thougt I'd list some of the new terms I'm seeing with brief definitions, examples of usage and references to discussions related to these terms. Hope this is useful.

[Update (Aug 29, 2008): Added "Cloud Spanning"]

Cloudburst: The term cloudburst is being use in two meanings, negative and positive:

Cloudburst (negative): The failure of a cloud computing environment due to the inability to handle a spike in demand. Reference:"The only way to do cloud computing efficiently is to share the cloud -
to establish a broad, multitenant grid (or a number of them) that
balances the loads of many different companies. Otherwise, it'll be one
cloudburst after another, and a whole lot of underutilized capital
assets." Source: Nicholas Carr: Intuit's cloudburst frustrates customers.

Cloudburst (positive): The dynamic deployment of a software application that runs on internal organizational compute resources to a public cloud to address a spike in demand.Reference: "ISV virtual appliances should underpin a new surge in cloud use
followed by self-service mechanisms and enterprise connectors enabling
organizations to 'cloudburst' to using cloud services." Source: The 451 Group: RightScale rolls its on-ramp toward other cloud systems (subscription required)Related uses: Cloudbursting.Reference "In addition to direct sales to enterprises, going forward it hopes that
extending out from private clouds to public ones – what we like to call
'cloudbursting' – will become a prevailing IT weather pattern and
provide it with additional opportunities." Source: The 451 Group: Q-Layer has the wisdom to enable private clouds (subscription required)

Cloudstorming: The act of connecting multiple cloud computing environments. Reference: "...Zimory will be covering off the key cloudy marketplaces and activities:
public cloud, internal cloud, cloudbursting (grow-over from internal to
public clouds) and cloudstorming (connecting multiple clouds)." Source: The 451 Group: A Cloud for All Seasons

Vertical Cloud: A cloud computing environment optimized for use in a particular vertical -- i.e., industry -- or application use case.Reference: "The verticalization of the cloud would provide marketing benefits, as
Friedman notes, while also providing a possible means of addressing
issues of information security crucial to industries such as health
care and financial services." Source: Nicholas Carr: The vertical cloud

Private Cloud: A cloud computing-like environment within the boundaries of an organization and typically for its exclusive usage. Reference: "It is these companies that have dramatically leveraged their internal
and originally Private Cloud Computing infrastructures to significant
economic benefit. " Source: Kent Langley: Private Cloud Computing: A Few Thoughts

Internal Cloud: A cloud computing-like environment within the boundaries of an organization and typically available for exclusive use by said organization.Reference: "With Cloud Computing becoming more and more popular, large corporations
are likely to set up their own clouds and integrate them with external
clouds, like Amazon EC2." Source: Markus Klems: Internal Cloud

Hybrid Cloud: A computing environment combining both private (internal) and public (external) cloud computing environments. May either be on a continuous basis or in the form of a 'cloudburst'.Reference: "Microsoft would, no doubt, agree. Their "software plus services"
approach similarly advocates a hybrid cloud/desktop environment." Source: Kendall Whitehouse: Kevin Lynch: Clearing the AIR

Cloudware: A general term referring to a variety of software, typically at the infrastructure level, that enables building, deploying, running or managing applications in a cloud computing environment.Reference: "Go to Google Maps, Yahoo Mail, or MySpace — most of Web 2.0, in other words — and you're using cloudware." Source: Wired: Geekipedia - Cloudware

External Cloud: A cloud computing environment that is external to the boundaries of the organization. Although it often is, an external cloud is not necessarily a public cloud. Some external clouds make their cloud infrastructure available to specific other organizations and not to the public at-large.Reference: "If an enterprise were to run an app in an external Cloud and wants to
connect that to their systems of record in their own datacenters, they
might want to consider the same platform in their data centers." Source: Bert Armijo: Pain in the aaSemantics

Public Cloud: A cloud computing environment that is open for use to the general public, whether individuals, corporations or other types of organizations. Amazon Web Services are an example of a public cloud.Reference: Gerrit Huizenga: Um, Just who is managing your public cloud?

Cloud Enabler: A general term that refers to organizations (typically vendors) who are not cloud providers per se, but make available technology, such as cloudware, that enables cloud computing.

Cloud-Oriented Architecture (COA): An architecture for IT infrastructure and software applications that is optimized for use in cloud computing environments. The term is not yet in wide use, and as is the case for the term "cloud computing" itself, there is no common or generally accepted definition or specific description of a cloud-oriented architecture.Reference: James Urquhart: The Principles of Cloud Oriented Architecture

Cloud Service Architecture (CSA): A term coined by Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at Amazon Web Services. The term describes an architecture in which applications and application components act as services on the cloud, which serve other applications within the same cloud environment.Reference:Jeff Barr: The Emerging Cloud Service Architecture

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): A term coined by Reuven Cohen, CEO and founder of Enomaly. The term describes a concept that is similar to, and derived from, the familiar concept of a Virtual Private Network (VPN), but applied to cloud computing. It is the notion of turning a public cloud into a virtual private cloud, particularly in terms of security and the ability to create a VPC across components that are both within the cloud and external to it.Reference: "A VPC is a method for partitioning a public computing utility such as
EC2 into quarantined virtual infrastructure. A VPC may encapsulate
multiple local and remote resources to appear as a single homogeneous
computing environment bridging the ability to securely utilize remote
resources as part of an seamless global compute infrastructure." Source: Reuven Cohen: Life in the Cloud: Virtual Private Cloud

Cloud Portability: The ability to move applications (and often their associated data) across cloud computing environments from different cloud providers, as well as across private or internal cloud and public or external clouds.

Cloudsourcing - As defined by Dion Hinchcliffe:
"Leveraging services in the network cloud to provide external computing
capabilities, often to replace more expensive local IT capabilities.Cloudsourcing can theoretically
provide significant economic benefits along with some attendant
trade-offs. These trade-offs can include security and performance. The term "cloud" represents a set
of external services on a 3rd party network, usually the Internet. The
services can represent raw computing, storage, messaging, or more
structured capabilities such as vertical and horizontal business
applications, even community. These services are delivered over the network, but generally behave as if they are local." Read an overview of cloudsourcing by Dion Hinchcliffe.

Cloud Spanning: Running an application in a way that its components straddle multiple cloud environments (which could be any combination of internal/private and external/public clouds. Unlike Cloud Bursting, which refers strictly to expanding the application to an External Cloud to handle spikes in demand, Cloud Spanning includes scenarios in which an applications component are continuously distributed across multiple clouds.

August 07, 2008

Toon Vanagt at Virtualization.com recorded a video interview with me at Structure 08 in San Francisco (I spoke on a panel). I talk about cloud computing and GigaSpaces, virtual middleware, the economics of pay-per-use pricing and more. Here it is: